EarthWorld

This was a delight. EarthWorld is the first proper adventure for the new TARDIS team of the (amnesiac) Doctor, Fitz, and Anji following the trapped-on-Earth arc; Anji was introduced in the previous book, Escape Velocity (which I read back around the time it came out, in 2001), but this was her first trip in the TARDIS. I don't have much memory of Anji despite reading five novels featuring her back in the day, but she is great here. Rayner has an exceptional handle on her, much the same way she does Bernice Summerfield. She is real, funny, and inventive, and her internal monologue utterly convinces; much of the novel is told from her perspective, and the book works all the better for it. I liked the e-mails she writes her (dead) show more boyfriend sprinkled throughout the text; I liked her interactions with the three would-be rebels; I liked her solutions to the situations she ends up in. I have three more Eighth Doctor Adventures featuring Anji that I am slated to read in the coming year; I can only hope those writers measure up to Rayner.

At one point, I started to wonder if Fitz was a bit flanderized-- he seemed pretty pathetic. But I think Fitz actually kind of is pathetic, it's just that he's normally written by male authors who sympathize with his patheticness. And if he feels flanderized, well, that's because (as the novel delves into a bit) he was literally flanderized in the novel Interference. His existential crisis was well handled, and I liked his resolution at the novel's end.

The one weak point of characterization is the Doctor himself. I liked the slightly off-kilter Doctor we got in the Earth arc novels The Turing Test and Father Time, and here it seems that he knows a little too much about how he is "supposed" to act on an adventure considered it's his first one. But there is a neat moment at the end, where he does some stuff no other Doctor would do, and Rayner captures Paul McGann's performance as well.

All this, plus it's that rarest of things: a media tie-in with thematic depth! This is a story about memory, and the gap between what we remember and what actually was. The Doctor has lost him memories, Fitz is made up of memories, Anji struggles over her memories of Dave, the planet New Jupiter is in a war over to what extent their cultural memory of Earth should dominate them, the EarthWorld theme park is entirely made up of misremembered Earth history, the president of New Jupiter struggles with false memories he's invented. It all comes together quite nicely, without being ham-handed. Definitely one of the best EDAs, and a worthy choice for BBC Books's fiftieth anniversary reprint line. show less

There are some good ideas here—the Doctor still grappling with the lingering effects of his amnesia, Anji in the first throes of grief for her boyfriend, Fitz having identity issues in light of everything that he (or some version of him) has been through—but I found myself disliking how Jacqueline Rayner dealt with them. Admittedly, a lot of my disappointment with the book is shaped by how Rayner deals with gender issues. She seems to have been vibrating with the need not to be seen as one of those Shrill Feminists, and so she/Anji are keen to remind us throughout that she's Not Like the Other Girls. (To be fair, getting a gig writing DW tie-in novels as a woman ca. 2000 probably wasn't easy and Rayner may well have felt that she show more couldn't push things too far but... there were other approaches, Jacqueline.) Even worse, though, was what Rayner does with Fitz. As much as he has sympathetic moments here as he deals with the existential horror of knowing that he's not the "real" Fitz, that he's essentially a clone with the memories of the original, now dead, Fitz, his reflexive, nasty sexism (more than once he offhandedly thinks of a woman as a bitch or a bint; he crashes a vehicle "while distracted by a frozen female android in a miniskirt", etc.) continues to sour me on him as a character. And that's even before we get into the skin-crawling way he thinks about how physically attractive some characters who are barely teenagers are. I came very close to giving up on the book there and then. There are the kernels of a better book here but wow, the vibes are rancid. show less

A good book to read. I felt the ending was a bit weak but I still enjoyed it. The Doctor, Anji and Fitz arrive on a future world that has theme park called EarthWorld. However, because this is the future, the memories of the past are a bit incorrect to comic affect. The Doctor, however, makes a good point when Fitz complains that the details about King Arthur are all wrong. He says that Fitz's idea of King Arthur is just as distorted by time as the theme park's is. There are an assortment of interesting characters, homicidal triplet princesses, an Elvis impersonator, an academic seeking a prize, an advisor seeking power, a dead "queen" (possibly), and an alligator called Princess Leia.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2131876.html

I liked it a lot, though it is fairly heavy on continuity - the Doctor is still suffering from amnesia, new companion Anji is mourning the death of her boyfriend in the previous volume. This picks up the murderous amusement park referenced in the title, but also lots of mad alien stuff and entertaining misinterpretations of Earth history, all stuff that has also been riffed on by New Who. Rayner is rarely less than solid, and I enjoyed this one a lot, as part of the ongoing Eighth Doctor story arc.